History: the Struggle for Liberty an Extended Seminar with Ralph Raico

History: The Struggle for Liberty An Extended Seminar with Ralph Raico

The lessons we draw from history depend on what we regard as the main theme of history. Professor Ralph Raico, as the leading classical liberal historian of our time, believes that the main theme is also the most neglected: the rise of liberty against the despotism of the state.

In pursuing this theme in this wonderful classroom course, Raico is taking up a project initiated by the brilliant 19th century historian Lord Acton, and variously pursued by great scholars such as Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard. Raico discusses the origin of the idea of liberty, its growth, its friends and enemies throughout history, and its possible future.

As Raico makes clear, the history of liberty is intertwined with the history of Europe and its outposts—the Europe that has been sometimes defined as extending from Warsaw to San Francisco. Raico argues that the idea of liberty arose specifically in Western Christendom for geographic, intellectual, ideological, and theological reasons. He discusses the events, ideas, debates, and institutions that were crucial in the process of creating the “European miracle” of the most astonishing advance of civilization in history. Throughout this 10-lecture course, Raico draws attention to literature, personalities, and events that made the differ - ence. Most importantly, Raico discusses the origin and effects of what Ludwig von Mises called the “primordial thing: the idea of freedom from the state.” The roots of this idea extend far back into the middle ages and the early centuries of Christianity. They came to fruition in the Industrial Revolution, which is vigorously defended, and were never more assaulted than in the French and Bolshevik Revolutions. The relationship between liberty and empire is also discussed, with special reference to the problem of American imperialism.

This course would be enormously valuable in any time, but it is especially essential in ours when the theme of liber - ty has been so neglected in scholarly literature and the popular press. This course serves as an antidote to what many have learned in their colleges and universities, which have demonized the history of Europe as one long period of exploitation and genocide. The best response to this calumny, Raico shows, is a detailed survey of the ideas, peoples, technologies, achievements, not in order to dismiss the crimes of the men of power but to draw attention to the rare accomplishments of the idea of liberty itself.

Ralph Raico, professor of European history at Buffalo State College, and Schlarbaum laureate, is the author of a history of German liberalism, Die Partei der Freiheit, and such articles as “World War I: The Turning Point” and “Rethinking Churchill” in the The Costs of War. Raico has a gift for presenting history in a manner that is authoritative, clear, calm, and systematic, but also rich in detail and filled with moral passion. They are graduate-level lectures that can also be of enormous valuable for anyone from high school to lifetime learners of any age. This is a set of lectures to treasure and learn from again and again.

Supplemental to: History: The Struggle for Liberty An Extended Seminar with Ralph Raico Books on the Meaning and History of Liberty by David Gordon

The following reading list includes about 125 books, useful for understanding liberty and the system of individual enterprise. It emphasizes, with a few exceptions, modern rather than historical works. It makes no claim to be comprehensive and is nothing more than an introduction to a vast literature. Only books currently in print have been included.

2 Acton, Lord. Selected Writings of Lord Acton, 3 volumes, edited by J. Rufus Fears (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1988). A comprehensive collection of essays by a great nineteenth-century classical liberal. Acton distrusted political power, especially when used for allegedly moral aims. Volumes include: Essays in the History of Liberty, Essays in the Study and Writing of History, and Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality.

Adams, Charles. For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993). Adams, in a tour de force, interprets world history as the story of taxation and resistance to it.

______. When in the Course of Human Events (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). An excellent defense of the Southern view of the Civil War. Lincoln does not fare well. The comparison of Charles Dickens and John Stuart Mill on the Civil War is especially well done.

Anderson, Benjamin. Economics and the Public Welfare (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1949). Anderson, a free-mar - ket economist who worked for the Chase Manhattan Bank, gives a detailed criticism of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Far from getting the economy out of the Great Depression, the New Deal made matters worse.

Aristotle. Ethics and Politics. These basic works set the foundation for all later Western moral and political thought. Rothbard’s natural rights libertarianism draws heavily on certain Aristotelian themes, while rejecting others.

Barnett, Randy. The Structure of Liberty (New York: Clarendon Press, 1998). An important defense of libertarian legal theory. Barnett argues for libertarian rights on grounds of knowledge, interest, and power.

Bastiat, Frédéric. Economic Sophisms (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1964). This includes some of Bastiat’s clas- sic satirical essays attacking protective tariffs and other interventionist measures. He stresses the unseen results of laws designed to “help” various groups.

______. The Law (Los Angeles: Phamphletters, 1944). Criticizes planners who regard people as material to be molded into a pattern; Hayek took up this line of thought in The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944).

Bauer, Peter T. From Subsistence to Exchange and Other Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). Bauer, the foremost free-market expert on development economics, shows that state planning hurts economic growth. Planners characteristically ignore small traders, whose activities are vital.

3 Belloc, Hillaire. The Servile State (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Classics, 1977). A prescient warning against welfare- state measures that erode individual responsibility.

Benson, Bruce. The Enterprise of Law (San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute, 1990). Almost everyone argues that protection must be provided by a state that holds a monopoly of force. Benson subjects this belief to withering assault. Law and protection have often in history been secured by private means.

Berger, Raoul. Government By Judiciary: The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund., 1999). Strong indictment of the U.S. Supreme Court for usurpation of power, especially through misreading of the Fourteenth Amendment. Berger defends original intent in interpretation.

Bethell, Tom. The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity through the Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998). Bethell indicts economics for giving no adequate account of the nature and significance of property rights.

Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen von. The Exploitation Theory of Socialism-Communism, 3rd rev. ed. (Spring Mills, Penn.: Libertarian Press, 1975). This is an excerpt from the author’s massive three volume Capital and Interest (South Holland, Ill.: Libertarian Press, 1959), which the dedicated may wish to attempt. Böhm-Bawerk destroys Marx’s labor theory of value.

Bradford, M.E. A Better Guide Than Reason: Federalists and Anti-Federalists (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994). Bradford, an outstanding Southern literary scholar, denies that equality is a basic value in American history. Offers strong criticism of Lincoln as a leveling dictator.

______. The Reactionary Imperative: Essays Literary and Political (Peru, Ill.: Sherwood Sugden, 1989). A collection of essays that stresses the influence of rhetoric on politics.

Buchanan, James M. Cost and Choice: An Inquiry in Economic Theory (Chicago: Markham Publishing, 1969). Buchanan offers a strong argument for the Austrian subjective view of costs. Buchanan saw in the 1960s, much against the mainstream, that Mises was correct about socialist calculation.

Burckhardt, Jacob. Reflections on History (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1979). The great Swiss historian indicts power as evil. For this he was bitterly criticized by Carl Schmitt and the Nazi intellectual historian Christoph Steding.

4 Chesterton, G.K. What’s Wrong With the World? (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1920). Chesterton uses his immense gift for paradox to show the fallacies of those in revolt against the natural order. He refuted contemporary feminism in advance of its birth.

Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (New York: Macmillan, 1968). The gruesome har - vest of Stalinism. Communist mass murders did not deter many Western intellectuals from championing the “Soviet Experiment.”

Constant, Benjamin. Constant: Political Writings, Biancamaria Fontana, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Constant’s distinction between ancient and modern liberty is an essential insight.

Courtoise, Stephane et al. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). Mass murder is a constant characteristic of Communist regimes. The comparison of Soviet and Nazi atrocities was too much for some French bien pensants.

Creveld, Martin van. The Rise and Decline of the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). An erudite work by a leading military historian, who argues that the state is a historically limited phenomenon that is due to be supplanted.

Danford, John W. The Roots of Freedom: A Primer on Modern Liberty (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2000). An excellent short survey of ideas from political philosophy that have influenced American constitutional government.

Denson, John V., ed., The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers). An important anthology that shows the disastrous consequences of America’s wars. Ralph Raico’s essays on Churchill and on World War I are especially significant.

Ely, John Hart. War and Responsibility (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). Shows that the war power under the U.S. Constitution rests exclusively with Congress. Ely, a noted legal theorist, refutes the argument that Presidential military initiative is needed to deal with emergencies.

Epstein, Richard A. Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). Epstein shows that anti-discrimination laws do not achieve their aims.

5 ______. Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). Epstein uses the law of takings to develop an important legal argument that sharply limits government action.

Fisher, Louis. Presidential War Power (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995). Like Ely, Fisher demonstrates who holds the war power in the U.S. Constitution. Both books supplement each other; Fisher deals simply and fully with the historical record, while Ely concentrates on legal arguments.

Flew, Antony. Equality in Liberty and Justice (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, [1989] 2001). An outstanding British philosopher associated with the ordinary language school assails egalitarianism as a perversion of justice.

Flynn, John T., and Gregory P. Pavlik. Forgotten Lessons: Selected Essays of John T. Flynn (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Eduction, 1996). Flynn shows how statist regimes, including Roosevelt’s New Deal, promote militarism and war to distract attention from economic failure.

______. The Roosevelt Myth (San Francisco: Fox and Wilkes, 1948). Franklin Roosevelt’s vanity and lack of prin- ciple led him to dictatorial measures and a world war that advanced the interests of Soviet Russia.

Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

______, and Rose D. Friedman, Free to Choose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, [1979] 1980). These two books present a Chicago School defense of a relatively free market. Although Austrians will disagree with a number of points, the books offer valuable criticisms of licensing and other interventionist policies.

Funkenstein, Amos. Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989). Vital for the relation of theology to secular thought in European history. Funkenstein shows how many political concepts follow a similar logic to key terms in theology. A work of profound erudition.

Gallaway, Lowell and Richard Vedder. Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth-Century America (London: Holmes and Meier, 1993). The authors offer substantial evidence that wage rates that are rigid downward lead to unemployment. A valuable application of economic principles to historical examples.

6 Garrett, Garret. The People’s Pottage (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printer, [1953] 1992). America has become an empire, preserving only the form of a republic. Garrett draws suggestive parallels between America and Rome in the period when Caesarism replaced the republic.

Garrison, Roger. Time and Money: The Macroeconomics of Capital Structure (London: Routledge, 2001). An excellent presentation of Austrian macroeconomics. The Mises-Hayek account of the business cycle is contrasted with Keynesian and monetarist theories.

Gordon, David, ed. Secession, State, and Liberty (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1998). An anthology of essays in defense of the right to secession; the essays by Donald Livingston and Murray Rothbard, among others, are of major importance.

Gottfried, Paul. After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999). Gottfried shows that modern liberals act as virtual thought police to suppress ideas of which they dis- approve. A perfect illustration of Bastiat’s key point in The Law.

Hayek, Friedrich von, ed. Capitalism and the Historians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954). One of the most frequent arguments of opponents of capitalism is that the Industrial Revolution worsened the condition of the British working class. Hayek, W.H. Hutt, and others refute this convincingly.

______. The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: Henry Regnery Gateway, 1972). A comprehensive analysis of the rule of law. Hayek makes some surprising statements, e.g., he disapproves of some of the Supreme Court’s anti-New Deal decisions (p. 190), but his immensely erudite book deserves careful study.

______. The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Press, [1955] 1979). Perhaps Hayek’s most important book. Attacks social engineering and defends individualist methodol- ogy in the social sciences.

______. Law, Legislation, and Liberty, 3 volumes. Particularly important is the second volume, The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), which argues that the concept of social justice is inco- herent. Other volumes are Rules and Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973) and The Political Order of a Free People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

7 ______. The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1944] 1945). One of the most famous of all defenses of classical liberalism. Hayek shows that socialist thinkers wish to impose their values on others. “Advanced” thinkers led the way to totalitarianism.

Hazlitt, Henry. Economics in One Lesson (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, [1962] 1975). The lesson, not at all easy for policy makers to learn, is that interference with the free market has indirect consequences, usually of a disastrous sort.

______. The Failure of the “New Economics” (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1959). A chapter-by-chapter analysis of Keynes’s General Theory.

______. The Foundations of Morality (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, [1964] 1994). A brilliantly clear presentation of moral theory. Hazlitt defends the free market on utilitarian grounds, in the style of Mises.

Herbert, Auberon. The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State and Other Essays (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1978). Herbert, a follower of Herbert Spencer, extends the law of equal freedom more consistently and radical- ly than his mentor.

Higgs, Robert. Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Higgs shows how wars lead to increased state control. Statism remains in place in peacetime through the ratchet effect.

Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. Economics and Ethics of Private Property (Norwell, Mass.: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993). Presents Hoppe’s important attempt to show that rejection of libertarian rights is self-defeating.

Hummel, Jeffrey R. Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War (Chicago: Open Court, 1996). Hummel argues that war was not needed to end slavery and defends the right of secession.

Hutt, W.H. The Keynesian Episode: A Reassessment Episode (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Press, 1979). A devastating criticism of the Keynesian system, based on wide knowledge of the literature. Though Hutt’s style is difficult, he makes acute points not found elsewhere.

8 Jasay, Anthony de. The State (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985). De Jasay demonstrates, using public choice arguments, that the state must move in the direction of Leviathan.

Johnson, Paul. A History of the American People (New York: Harper Collins, 1997) and Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties (New York: Harper and Row, 1983). These two books provide a good guide to, respectively, American history and the history of the twentieth century. In both, Johnson uses Rothbard’s analysis to account for the onset of the Great Depression.

Jones, Eric. The European Miracle, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Why did Europe develop economically, in a way unlike any other region before the eighteenth century? Jones shows that free institutions are a large part of the answer.

Jouvenel, Bertrand de. On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1993). De Jouvenel traces the growth of the state, showing that democracy often leads to increased control over the individual. The treatment of Rousseau is especially good.

Kirzner, Israel M. Competition and Entrepreneurship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Kirzner presents his influential account of entrepreneurship, based on perception of opportunity.

______. The Driving Force of the Market: Essays in Austrian Economics (London: Routledge, 2000). Kirzner attempts to justify his coordination of plans standard for welfare economics and gives a sensitive exposition of Mises and other Austrians.

Knight, Frank H. Selected Essays by Frank H. Knight: “What Is Truth” in Economics? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Two volumes. Although Knight was by no means a supporter of laissez-faire capitalism, his depth and ability to find problems with standard arguments for socialism and interventionism make him must reading. Volumes include Laissez-Faire: Pro and Con and “What is Truth” in Economics.

La Boétie, Etienne de. The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, 2nd rev. ed. (Toronto: Black Rose Books, 1997). A sixteenth-century essay by a young friend of Montaigne that has had great impact on libertar - ian thought. Government requires a level of popular support to maintain itself. The edition with Murray Rothbard’s excellent preface is recommended.

9 Leoni, Bruno. Freedom and the Law (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Press, 1991). Leoni extends Hayek on spontaneous order to show that judge-made law is often superior to the enactments of legislatures.

Livingston, Donald. Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). In the course of a comprehensive study of Hume, Livingston provides the best discussion of the right to secession that I have read.

Locke, John. Second Treatise on Civil Government (Oxford, U.K.: Basil Blackwell, 1946). The theory of property set forward here is basic to subsequent classical liberalism.

Lomasky, Loren. Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). An excellent philosophical argument for classical liberalism, based on the need for persons to pursue their own projects in life.

Mallock, W.H. A Critical Examination of Socialism (New York: Harper & Bros., 1907). Mallock, an outstanding nineteenth-century British thinker, argues that progress and wealth depend on allowing scope for the creative individual. Socialism defies this fact and cannot work.

Martin, James J. Men Against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827–1908 (Colorado Springs, Colo.: Ralph Myles, 1970). The best account of the nineteenth-century American tradition of individualist anarchism. Tucker, Spooner, and others are neglected thinkers of major importance.

Masters, Edgar Lee. Lincoln: The Man, rev. ed. (Columbia, S.C.: Foundation for American Education, [1931] 1959). Masters, fed up with Lincoln hagiography, paints the Great Emancipator as psychologically abnormal.

McDonald, Forrest. States’ Rights and the Union: Imperium in Imperio, 1776–1876 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002). McDonald shows that the United States was established as an association of states. With some dissent, it was so regarded until Lincoln and the Civil War changed things.

Mencken, H.L. Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949). A collection of Mencken’s mordantly funny articles. Thorstein Veblen and other targets were never the same when Mencken had finished with them.

Menger, Carl. Principles of Economics (New York: New York University Press, 1981). The founding work of Austrian economics. Menger’s subjectivism revolutionized economic theory.

10 Milbank, John. Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993). Though Milbank is far from a classical liberal, his book demands attention. He argues that modern social science rests on dubious theological assumptions. Social science has as its basic purpose the justification of violence.

Miller, Fred. Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle’s Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Argues, contrary to Alasdair MacIntyre and many others, that Aristotle had a notion of individual rights.

Mises, Ludwig von. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Scholar’s Edition (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, [1949] 1998). The greatest twentieth-century work in the social sciences. Mises replies convincingly to critics of his socialist calculation argument, among thousands of other insights.

______. Liberalism: A Socio-Economic Exposition (Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1978). Mises argues that classical liberalism is the path to peace. Conflicts among nationalities can be resolved in lasting fashion only by rigid restriction of the scope of the state.

______. Omnipotent Government: The Rise of Total State and Total War (Spring Hill, Penn.: Libertarian Press, [1969] 1985). A penetrating account of how interventionism in the German economy led to totalitarianism. Together with Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, it offers an interpretation of intellectual tends in pre-World War II Europe of unparal- leled depth.

______. Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, [1969] 1981). Mises’s calculation argument poses a challenge that socialism cannot meet. Not content with this fatal blow, Mises raises all manner of other critical points. After he is through, nothing of socialism is left standing.

______. Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, [1971] 1985). Among other things, the best analysis of the Marxist theory of history. Hayek regarded this as an unduly neglected book.

______. The Theory of Money and Credit (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, [1950] 1980). A thorough treatment of monetary theory. The money regression theorem shows that money must have begun as a commodity. Mises strongly defends the gold standard as a means of monetary reconstruction.

Morley, Felix. Freedom and Federalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959). An outstanding defense of states’ rights and interposition by a veteran journalist.

11 Nisbet, Robert. The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom (London: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1990). Nisbet argues that the modern state has worked to destroy all institutions that stand between it and the individual. Rousseau is a chief villain.

Nock, Albert Jay. Our Enemy the State (San Francisco: Fox and Wilkes, 1984). A brilliantly written demonstration that the state is an instrument of predation. Nock derived his account from Franz Oppenheimer, The State (New York: Free Live Editions, 1975), but Nock’s presentation is much clearer.

Nordlinger, Eric. Isolation Reconfigured (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). Nordlinger maintains that the United States should avoid foreign entanglements. The noninterventionist argument for American entry into both world wars is strong.

Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1977). Defends libertarianism with great philosophical acuity. Nozick’s analysis of Rawls’s theory of justice is the best ever written.

Olson, Mancur. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). Essential for any study of the problem of public goods. Hayek preferred it to Buchanan and Tullock’s Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965).

______. Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships (New York: Basic Books, 2000). Olson shows why limitations on government are necessary for economic growth.

Ortega y Gasset, José. The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993). This criticism of mass man is an indictment of much of twentieth-century political thought.

Pipes, Richard. Property and Freedom (New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 2000). An outstanding historian of Russia argues that property rights are essential to freedom. Interesting comparison of Britain and Russia.

Popper, Karl. The Poverty of Historicism, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002). Popper argues against the possibility of laws of historical change. His argument is fatal to Marxism.

Porter, Bruce. War and the Rise of the State (New York: Free Press, 1994). Like Higgs, but over a wider historical span, Porter shows how war leads to growth of state power.

12 Rahe, Paul. Republics, Ancient and Modern, 3 volumes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). A work of enormous scope and erudition. Rahe offers an excellent analysis of the influence of classical ideas on the American republican tradition. Although his Straussian assumptions are questionable, the book is essential. Volumes include: Inventions of Prudence: Constituting the American Regime, New Modes and Orders in Early Modern Political Thought, and The Ancient Regime in Classical Greece.

Raimondo, Justin. Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (Burlingame, Calif.: Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993). Raimondo shows convincingly that William Buckley and other cold war - riors derailed American conservatism, so far as foreign policy is concerned. The Old Right favored peace and nonin- tervention.

Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead (New York: Signet Books, [1943] 1996) and Atlas Shrugged (New York: Signet Books, [1957] 1982). These two novels strongly defend the view that ethics is based on rational self-interest. Though much in her thought is dubious, the “sense of life” on display in these books is valuable.

Reisman, George. Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (Ottawa, Ill.: Jameson Books, 1996). This massive tome attempts to combine Ricardian and Austrian economics to defend the free market. The view of capital theory present- ed is controversial but deserves study.

Röpke, Wilhelm. A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1960). The author uses moral arguments against Keynesian and inflationist policies.

Rothbard, Murray. America’s Great Depression (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, [1963] 2000). Contrary to popular belief, the Great Depression does not prove the failure of laissez-faire capitalism. Herbert Hoover was a strong interventionist.

______. An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, 2 volumes (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1995). Rothbard’s brilliant intellectual history is perhaps his greatest scholarly contribution. He stresses the Spanish scholastics and gives an outstanding analysis of the religious presuppositions of Marxism, among much else. Volumes include Classical Economics and Economic Thought Before Adam Smith.

______. Conceived in Liberty, 4 volumes (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, [1979] 1999). Comprehensive account of the colonial period and the American Revolution, emphasizing libertarian movements.

13 ______. The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, [1982] 1998). Rothbard’s fullest statement of his natural law grounding for rights.

______. Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2001); combined with Power and Market (Scholar’s Edition; Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2004). A major treatise that fills out and extends Misesian economics. Penetrating discussions of monopoly price, Keynesianism, and myriad other topics.

______. Power and Market (Menlo Park, Calif.: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970). A comprehensive classifica- tion and analysis of all types of interference with the free market. Rothbard originally intended it to form part of Man, Economy, and State; combined with Man, Economy, and State (Scholar’s Edition; Auburn, Ala. Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2004).

______. What Has Government Done to Our Money? (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1990). A brilliantly concise answer to the question posed in the title. Rothbard defends the gold standard and opposes fractional reserve banking.

Schumpeter, Joseph. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper/Torchbooks, 1950). Schumpeter gives an unrivaled demolition of the perfect competition standard for monopoly. His elitist view of democracy merits attention; his views on socialist calculation do not.

Schoeck, Helmut. Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1987). Much of socialism and interventionism is rooted in envy. Schoeck gives a detailed historical and sociological account of envy’s malign consequences.

Simmons, A. John. Justification and Legitimacy: Essays on Rights and Obligations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

______. The Lockean Theory of Rights (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).

______. Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981).

______. On the Edge of Anarchy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). These four books are a neglected resource for classical liberal thought. Simmons argues that Lockean moral theory is soundly based. Lockean

14 arguments cannot be used to justify government; and anarchy, or something close to it, is the proper upshot of Locke’s thought. All major arguments designed to justify political obligation fail.

Smith, George. The Lysander Spooner Reader (San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1992). Spooner, a key nineteenth century individualist, razes to the ground social contract arguments for the state.

Sowell, Thomas. Knowledge and Decisions (New York: Basic Books, [1982] 1996). Sowell’s magnum opus. It offers a detailed account of spontaneous orders; Hayek greatly admired it.

______. The Quest for Cosmic Justice (New York: Free Press, 2002). Contemporary leftist thought is engaged in a futile effort to remodel the world. Economics teaches us the need to limit our goals, by making us aware that all action involves choice and cost.

Solzhenitsyn, Alesandr I. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). A riveting discussion of the Soviet concentration camp system. Communist terror and repression began with Lenin, not Stalin.

Spencer, Herbert. The Man Versus the State (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1946). A sharp attack on the “New Toryism” of the late nineteenth century. Spencer’s arguments against the early manifestations of the welfare state are of far reaching importance.

______. The Principles of Ethics (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Classics, [1879] 1978), vol. 2. The definitive statement of the great British philosopher’s political views, though some prefer his earlier Social Statics: Or the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified and the First of them Developed (New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, [1875] 1970). Spencer’s argument for rights is outstanding.

Steiner, Hillel. An Essay on Rights (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994). Steiner argues powerfully for an unusual variant of libertarianism. A key issue for him is to establish which rights can consistently exist together.

Stove, David. Against the Idols of the Age (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994). A major argument against modern varieties of relativism.

Sumner, W.G. What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1974). Sumner calls attention to the “Forgotten Man,” who must pay for harebrained schemes by which some endeavor to “do good” for others.

15 Trenchard, John, et al. Cato’s Letters or Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects, Ronald Hamowy, ed., 4 volumes in 2 (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1999). An eighteenth-century defense of libertarian natural rights, which decisively influenced the American Revolution. Hamowy’s scholarly annotations are of great value in understanding the text.

Tullock, Gordon. The Economics of Income Redistribution (Norwell, Mass.: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997). Tullock shows that the actions of supporters of massive redistribution to the poor belie their words. People are unwill- ing to redistribute large amounts of income to their own detriment, and plans to do so usually have some ulterior end.

Weaver, Richard. Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). The brilliant defense of property rights is more important than Weaver’s attempt to find the root of modern evil in medieval nominalism.

Wilson, Clyde, ed. The Essential Calhoun: Selections from Writings, Speeches, and Letters (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1992). An excellent anthology. Calhoun gave a penetrating defense of the “concurrent major - ity” as a limit to political innovation.

Yeager, Leland B. Ethics as Social Science: The Moral Philosophy of Social Cooperation (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 2001). A major defense of rule utilitarian ethics, in the style of Mises and Hazlitt. Yeager’s knowledge of the literature of ethics is extensive and deep.

______. The Fluttering Veil: Essays on Monetary Disequilibrium (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1997). An important collection of essays on monetary disequilibrium and related topics.

DAVID GORDON is a senior fellow at the Mises Institute, and the author/editor of The Mises Review . He was educated at UCLA, where he earned his Ph.D. in intellectual history, and is the author of Resurrecting Marx; The Philosophical Origins of Austrian Economics; Critics of Marx; and An Introduction to Economic Reasoning. He is also editor of Secession, State, and Liberty. Dr. Gordon’s articles have appeared in such journals as the Journal of Libertarian Studies and the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.